


Painted to Remember

by SunBox



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Artist Eren Yeager, Eren - Freeform, Eren Levi - Freeform, Eren Loves Levi, Ereri Week Spring 2016, Erwin has too many jobs, Established Levi/Eren Yeager, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hange sits on a jellyfish, Levi - Freeform, Levi Loves Eren, Levi/Eren Yeager Fluff, Levi/Eren Yeager-centric, M/M, SnK yaoi, Yaoi, aot yaoi, eren x levi - Freeform, ereri, ereri fluff, levi x eren - Freeform, snk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-12
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-10-03 07:19:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10238861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SunBox/pseuds/SunBox
Summary: “Nothing. It’s just… you have a beautiful smile, sir”, the boy silently stated and stuck his small brush into dark green paint, slowly and provocatively stroking the canvas in front of him, his eyes being at a steady position, refusing to move in any direction other than the green that was being smeared onto his painting. The older man refused to look anywhere but at the man that had a golden key hanging around his neck. Levi’s heart skipped a beat.“Do I know you”, he meant to ask, but it came out as a statement. He could see the young man flinch while painting, his hand freezing in place.





	

„What the… Why don't you just bring them over there yourself? It's not like you can’t stand up just ‘cause you got stabbed in the ass”, he said as his sharp, grayish eyes narrowed to a point where his friend wondered if it was even possible to see like that. Still, she smiled from ear to ear and wiggled in her barstool on which a thick towel was placed.

“Don’t be such a mood killer, Levi. You’ve seen how sick I was and, by the way, still am. Now, now. _Nodipecten nodosus_ are incredibly rare samples of seashells, and if someone were to find out that I had managed to fish them out of the sea…” a huge, but painful grin appeared on her face as she slammed her hands to the sides of her backside, “HAH! Whatever! Totally worth it!”

Levi watched Hange shifting on the barstool to make the extreme stinging sensation fade, but for the last three hours she hadn’t stopped complaining and Levi started believing it might be time to set a campfire, dance around it and sing the loudest as possible _“The witch is dead”_. Finally getting rid of the annoying blabbermouth would be pretty great, but it would also be pretty unfortunate on the other hand, considering he had to drag her ass across the beach just to get to the one single unnecessarily flashy and relatively small and old bar Erwin worked at. They weren’t even surprised when they had seen him run the bar since their tall blonde friend worked literally everywhere, whether it was at the bar, in a library, in school as a history teacher, and Hange swore she had seen him as a doctor once. She wasn’t up close and she couldn’t really tell, but the man’s eyebrows were something that didn’t just colonize every face.

“Haha… The pain…” Hange muttered as she clenched her hands into fists and slammed them against the counter, enough harshly to startle the short man beside her, a heavy blush on her face, “FEELS SO GOOD! Levi! Collection… completing…”

The once Captain of the Survey Corps, or so he had dreamt multiple times they were called, and so did Hange too, and so did Erwin, heavily sighed and pinched the top of his nose. Marine biologists.

“We are SO lucky that we had that storm last night, don’t you think? It’d be impossible to find those if it weren’t for that storm… I mean, it basically destroyed our vehicle. But still…”

“You mean you are also lucky to have plunged into the shallow water only to sit on a fuckin’ jellyfish just so you could pick up that one white lion’s paw?”

She looked back at him and relaxed her back a bit as her huge grin sweetened, “Well, of course. I’ve been through worse.”

“Tch. You’re not the one I care about, smartass. You threw up on my favorite towel and then I had to drag you all the way up here because you wished to get wasted before you die by being touched by a freaking jellyfish. I feel bad for that thing. Must have gotten a disease or some shit with you sitting on top of it.”

Hange suddenly threw a big old plastic bag full of seashells into his face and he flailed his thin arms around just to catch it before throwing a glare into her direction. She impishly smiled and turned to the bar owner who decided to deliver Hange’s drink himself.

“You know”, she hummed as she sat up straight to let the tall man put her order at the bar, “jellyfish don’t pick up human diseases. Also, I’m pretty much sure Jello is dead by now since I probably squashed him to death, with his neurotoxins in my _gluteus maximus_ being the only reminder that he even existed. I mean, he could have escaped, but I highly dou- eh?!” Hange exclaimed as her eyes widened when she saw the blue-eyed tall man put a bottle of _vinegar_ instead of her tequila in front of her. He also put baking soda on top of the bar and then kneeled to reach the height of her confused eyes, “What the hell, Erwin?! I was trying to enjoy my absolutely amazing and fulfilling day and then you come over to ruin it by not giving me my daily dose of intoxicant! I’m not gonna drink sodium hydrogen carbonate!”

Levi could honestly swear he had never seen Hange as mad as she was at that moment, and he found it rather amusing how she gripped the tall man by the collar and started shaking him violently, with the man having a blunt expression on his face.

“It’s not for you to drink”, he calmly stated and took her by the hands to put them away from him, gently smiling as he usually would, “it’s for your wound. You’ll apply it and the pain will fade.”

“Naaggh? Wha-what pain, eh?! I’m not in pain!” she nervously exclaimed as she searched for Levi’s eyes so he would cover her, but regretted inviting him to the trip to the seaside to help her get her seashell collection complete immediately afterwards.

“She sat on it.”

“Sat on what?”

“A jellyfish”, Levi finished their short conversation as Erwin burst into sudden light-hearted laughter, trying to calm down so that the guests wouldn’t be alarmed at the man howling out of no apparent reason at all, but saw it was pointless when he realized that everybody was already watching them, looking rather annoyed. Levi didn’t fail to realize it too.

Hundreds of years from then, and the three of them still had the problem of being incredibly unappealing to the people around them and still acted a bit out of place. The Survey Corps had it terrible, with everyone judging them and complaining about their constant failures, saying that they were a waste of time and effort, but the world today was not very different, Levi realized. But now the hatred wasn’t directed only towards them, the hatred was directed towards everyone, and since everyone had their right to tell their opinions it was relatively hard to find peace. Levi felt his heart clench and he stopped paying attention to the bickering pair of fools who he considered his friends. Why was fate so nice to him this time around, to let them remember the same things Levi did and to have them find him again, after so much time… He wondered whether others were alive somehow, somewhere. All the people that had died on the battlefields, the corpses’ rotten stench rising into the air and mixing with the stench of fire and fog, the children that had tried to run but were crushed under flying objects, the inability to see what was past the walls and the stupidity of the people inside of these walls that actually thought it would be safe to stay inside and that wanted to profit for as long as possible before the giant wretches would devour them all, one by one, tearing their limbs off, dropping them into their mouths, twist them and turn them with their disgusting tongues, crunch their skulls into half with their rotten teeth and then gulp them down, only to eventually throw their poor lifeless bodies up, letting them covered in their saliva… And when all was said and done, when they had killed every single beast roaming the walls, they headed out, only to see that the world outside was even more disgusting than the Titans themselves, with even more fire and corpses lying around everywhere, covering the dusty floor. He remembered seeing those people die by the hands of other humans, seeing his people die while fire was rising around him, he remembered himself panicking and throwing remains of houses around to find someone, the shock only evident by his widely opened eyes and static ringing in his ears with his heart beating out of his chest, blood on his hands, limping, dying, trying to save them, save him, but everything was slipping away, and so did he, too…

“Levi”, Erwin’s voice suddenly awoke him from his daytime nightmares and Levi gasped as he turned to see the man that had called him, “you look pale as well. Is something the matter? Should I get you anything?”

The short raven just stared into the tall blonde man’s big blue eyes, the look in them reminding him of the look he gave him when he had decided it would be the very last battle he would be participating in. Levi found himself unable to move or to breathe.

“No, no I’m fine. You take care of Shitty Glasses for me.”

“Levi?” Hange looked at him as well now, probably sensing his sudden distress and discomfort. The raven seemed even smaller, now that he had his arms crossed over his chest tightly and his head lowered to look at the greasy greenish wood beneath him. He suddenly got aware of the mixture of the smoke and alcoholic beverages in the room, the moist stench crawling up his nostrils and leaving a heavy ache in his lungs, and that furthermore made him panic internally. The man turned on his heel and waved his hand at his friends to meet the exit.

“I just need some fresh air. You continue on without me.”

“Are you sure you’ll-“

“I said I’m _fine_ ”, he snapped, but still looked at Hange in an apologetic way before slamming the wooden door behind him, leaping down that one step that lead to the entrance right into the soft sand beneath him that stretched itself out throughout the whole beach, feeling the smooth grains of sand touching the empty spaces between his toes and scowling. He waited for a few seconds to make sure nobody was coming after him before heavily sighing and passing through his silky black locks with his free hand, gazing into the distance. There weren’t many people around anymore luckily, so he didn’t need to worry about them looking at him and… _judging_ him. There was a soft, salty breeze in the air that only occasionally swept his hair up to mess his entire appearance up, or so he thought. The soothing scent of the sea extended through the whole area, and so did the light tones the rushing waves played upon reaching the shore and turning into foam before retracting back into the water nimbly. The sky above the light blue sea was mostly gray, with the clouds being a shade of light orange and pink as the sun was slowly beginning to set at the other end of the horizon. The clouds were parted, small and fluffy and were scattered mostly around the other side of the sea, above a small island in the middle of it that looked completely isolated, only tall thin trees were covering its shadowy surface. The waves were splashing the land in the distance fondly, so it didn’t leave any fondness to the land he stood on, much to his luck. He hated being splashed by water. The short man sighed, looking at the white plastic bag Hange had thrown into his direction, frowning again. The bag had a hole in it, but the big ass shell that Hange would, he was pretty much sure, die for immediately if necessary prevented the smaller shells from falling. Good. He didn’t have anything to carry them in anyways, and he didn’t plan to carry them around in his short sleeved black button up short. He knew people must have watched him in an odd way, since he was walking around the beach in a black shirt and skin tight, washed out, distressed blue jeans, but he tried not to care. Emphasis on _tried_.

“Tch. Might as well get it over with”, he muttered as he clenched the bag in his hand, jogging closer to the waves before starting towards Hange’s old red car that managed to get them to the beach before the steaming engine collapsed on itself, leaving them, more or less, stranded. After good twenty minutes of Levi cursing his entire lineage and country and Hange desperately dialing every single local car service, they both decided on asking Erwin for help since he lived nearby, who agreed on coming after finishing his shift of his, to them back then still unknown, job. At least they won’t have to feed themselves on greasy hotdogs and salt water for the rest of their lives. Hange would be disappointed, Levi figured.

The man stopped in his train of thoughts as soon as he heard the sound of dozens of shells sliding out of the small plastic bag he carried, and his eyes widened as he froze in place. Hange would strangle him if one single shell went missing.

“Shits _hitsh **it**_ ”, the usually collected man uttered under his breath and immediately fell to his knees, desperately clawing the ground to get all of the seashells out of the sand before the waves would catch them and drag them into the water, practically taking his head. A few people were still around and stared at the short raven who seemingly fought the waves with his bare fists as they tried to take the shells away from him. When he dug up everything he could, he started counting them, but the amount of shells he counted would get distorted every time he tried to count, so counting wasn’t about to save him. The only thing he knew was that the biggest and most beautiful shell was missing from the collection and no matter how desperately he searched for it and prayed for it to show up, he couldn’t find it. There was no shell that resembled a big animal’s paw, no white shell that had multiple orange lines adorning it. Hange would have his head as soon she would come back. That shell was her life now, he could tell by the weird and possessive way she stared while grinning at it for a couple of hours before finally putting it into the bag with _a hole in it._ Something was bound to go wrong, and Levi was that one man that always had no luck at anything in life and always had to be the one to take the blame when everything went wrong. He shot straight up and went the other way, looking around restlessly to spot the shell with his whole body tense, ready to hurt anyone and everyone who’d dare to step between him and his shell. It was hard for him to confess to himself, but if it came to the point of Hange dying from the sting, which he knew was extremely unlikely, he wanted that at least she would have that one shell beside her. No one else loved her anyways.

“Excuse me, sir!” a loud unknown voice came from the distance and the word ‘sir’ lingered in his head for a while out of no apparent reason. Why was his brain so focused on the word? It’s not that people call their seniors differently. The word was completely appropriate for the situation. Then why did his heart feel as if it tumbled out of its place before immediately climbing back to its previous position? He stopped in his rampage and looked back, spotting a young brunet dressed in a short sleeved white button-up shirt and beige bermuda pants, his hair somewhat longish and messy and his bangs falling into his face while running. The man stopped in front of him and Levi felt nauseous for a brief moment when he saw the boy’s teal, shining eyes before the younger man averted his gaze back down to his hands holding a relatively big white shell, “You dropped this earlier and I…”

Levi grabbed the shell out of the brunet’s cool hands and made his way down the path that led to the broken car.

“W-Wait!” the man’s voice came again and Levi rolled his eyes as he turned his head towards the unknown man at the same time, his signature emotionless expression on his face, with his thin black eyebrows plucked to perfection as they furrowed, his cold and sharp steel blue eyes narrowed and his colorless lips slightly parted. The younger man stared for a second too long before his sight fell at the sand covering the ground, “The shells will just fall out if you keep carrying them inside of that bag. I think I have one spare.”

There was long silence between them as Levi slowly blinked.

“…So?”

“Do you want one? A bag, I mean?” the young man eagerly asked and Levi raised a brow as the brunet ran towards an easel and canvas, squatting down to shake several painting tools out of a large, smeared plastic bag before rushing back to the raven that stood at the same place, his legs refusing to move. He was confused because of the unknown person’s determination to give him a freaking plastic bag. The man grabbed the old torn bag himself and shoved it into his one, handing them to the shorter man with shaking hands and a slight bow of his head as the man accepted. Levi stared at the boy’s face and vice versa for a long time.

“The hell’s your deal”, Levi decided to break the silence since the boy seemed reluctant to move. The younger responded with a flustered expression on his face before shaking it off to look back into Levi’s eyes.

“Nothing, sir!”

“Hmmm…” Levi hummed and his eyes trailed down the young man’s appearance, starting at his high forehead, his thick neglected eyebrows, his small nose, his plump red lips, getting to his long neck with his Adam’s apple barely bulging out, down to his collar that unsuccessfully covered his collarbones and then landing right at his bruised bare feet that had lines around their wrists that indicated he wore socks most of the times, even through summer, with thick veins protruding through his slightly tanned skin and with toes being perfectly aligned by size, with his pinky bended down a bit so it looked even smaller. And Levi couldn’t help but to feel as if it was all too familiar, especially those bruised feet that were covered in wet sand.

“Could you… do me a huge favor?” the young man’s voice suddenly came into his ears and Levi looked back up to meet the boy’s eyes that steadily faced the ground, “Could you perhaps… like, just stand here at the spot… and not move? At all?”

Levi narrowed his eyes in confusion, but the boy didn’t even give him a chance to decline as he rushed back to the canvas, hugged it in his arms and plopped down on the sand, crossing his legs around it as he hastily grabbed the nearest brush to him and stuck it into oil paint, aggressively stroking the big white canvas that covered his face from Levi’s sight. The short man couldn’t help but to stare at the person that made him forget what he was so stressed about at the first place. After just awkwardly standing there with the big plastic bag in both of his hands pressed to his chest and staring at the men and woman that passed by them, he averted his gaze to the wet sand beneath him and watched the waves engulf his bluish bare feet from time to time, shifting his weigh from one leg to the other.

“So… should I pose or some shit?” Levi soon asked and heard a chuckle from the man hidden by the white canvas. For whatever reason, he was relieved that his sad attempt of a joke was well received.

“I just want to capture your proportions, that’s all. You don’t need to do anything”, the boy said, not lifting his sight from the canvas. Levi raised a brow and waited for a little while before hearing the boy gasp, “I mean, like, for art purposes only, of course!” the boy raised his head just enough to glance at the other apologetically before burrowing his nose into the canvas once again, “I’ve recently been into drawing people and whatnot, but since people’s emotions are so hard to capture, I really need to practice a lot…”

“Artist, huh…?”

“What? Oh, no, far from that”, the man behind the canvas immediately responded, “As soon as my love for art crawled onto the surface, my dad immediately shoved that thought away and went into a detailed description of why being an artist is terrible and how that’d be the worst possible thing for me and so on and so forth… So I just draw or paint whenever I’m mad. Which is often.”

“Pig.”

“Huh?” the man worriedly asked and tilted his head just enough to see Levi.

“You don’t need to be a certified artist to be an artist. I mean, even the way you speak sounds like a fucking artistic piece of poetry shit.”

“Uh… thanks”, the man silently stated before sticking his nose back into his work. Levi could swear he saw the slightest tint of pink in his cheeks, but why would the man blush? Levi knew he had a filthy mouth that just repelled everyone, so he got even more confused and… intrigued, dare he think. The next couple of minutes were filled with a rush of anxiety in Levi and the waves trying to sooth him, until a big wave came and caught him by surprise, making him try to step away, but his foot somehow managed to get stuck in the, at the moment very hated, wet sand and when he managed to pull it out, he found his backside being sent into the shoal. He just stared ahead of himself for a while, with only his backside and hands in the water, unable to realize what had happened.

“Levi! Are you-“ the young man stopped mid-sentence when he saw the man’s wide eyes looking at him and sat back down at the ground immediately, hiding his face from the older man behind the canvas again. Levi still kept staring for a while before cursing under his breath and getting up, brushing his pants as if they were covered in sand, not in water. He stepped a step closer to the young man whose heart skipped a beat, but he went relieved again when Levi just scoffed and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Is everything OK?” the brunet shyly asked and Levi shot a quick glance at him before lowering his sight to the ground again.

_Levi._

“I just hope I didn’t sit on a jellyfish or some shit. A friend of mine did that today and threw up on my towel, and I fear the worst.”

“Seriously?” the boy asked with a wide smile plastered on his face, “I did that too, once.”

“And?” Levi’s eyes met his and the boy immediately looked down again, much to Levi’s annoyance. Now his shining eyes that reflected the ocean’s color were trying to tell him something, and he was determined to find out what.

“Well, aside from my butt turning bright red at the spot it stung me at and having to throw up the whole day, it went surprisingly well”, he explained with a smile that was invisible to Levi as the boy was hiding behind his painting, but Levi could feel it being there, appearing in the middle of the sentence as if he was unable to hold it in, for some reason.

“You’re from around here? You seem to be accustomed”, Levi soon continued the small talk, trying hard not to butt in into his life, but found himself unable to step away once he had heard his name spoken out, as if the boy already knew him from somewhere. But Levi was sure he had never seen him, not in his lifetime.

“Ah? No”, the young man spoke as he tilted his head to the side to see the raven for a second before smearing something onto his canvas again, his hand seemingly in a rush to finish the lines it had started drawing, “No, but I’m here quite often. Every summer my parents and us go through a slight crisis and decide to go to the same location every year, since my dad has too much money in his hands, my mom is always stressed because she gets to do all the housework since my dad’s a busy doctor and me and my half brother do jack shit, he being the world’s greatest self-proclaimed genius and me being the world’s worst self-proclaimed artist, whether in writing or drawing. Although there’s like a one hundred eighty degree angle between those things, we still find similarities in them and start fighting over them… Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to ramble”, he apologized as he gently blushed, awkwardly smiling into Levi’s direction. But for once in his lifetime, Levi felt interested in a person’s background, although this was just some random stranger.

“Go on”, Levi simply stated with a cold glare still adorning his visage, so the younger man’s awkward smile turned into one of the sweetest smiles he had ever seen.

“Well, he’s that type of guy who’d just sneak into your room at five a.m. to play his favorite heavy metal screaming right into your ear, at max volume and then gets confused why you’d get angry. ‘Cause I’m more into alternative, Douchebag. And yeah, because I’m trying to, I don’t know, sleep? And while I stare at the stars at night, because I can, he sneaks behind me and tries to suffocate me by pulling me up into a bone-crushing ‘hug’, and that guy’s so burly you can’t breathe when he does that, and he freaking messes up my shirt. Then I try drawing planets and he’s like ‘looks terrible’, ‘Venus is smaller than Earth, Dumbass’, ‘Uranus has twenty seven known satellites’, ‘even my mom in her coffin could draw better, and she had hands like an elephant’. I really hate that guy. And love him. But mostly hate him.”

Levi didn’t even realize his frown turned upside down somewhere in the middle of the brunet’s speech as he heard that he had a cozy, safe life, and for some reason, it meant _so much_ to him. As soon as he realized that he had been smiling, he quickly composed himself and looked right into his eyes, catching him staring.

“What?” Levi spat, his brows furrowing again, although there was no real annoyance there since the other man showed a wide, coy smile.

“Nothing. It’s just… you have a beautiful smile, sir”, the boy silently stated and stuck his small brush into dark green paint, slowly and provocatively stroking the canvas in front of him, his eyes being at a steady position, refusing to move in any direction other than the green that was being smeared onto his painting. The older man refused to look anywhere but at the man that had a golden key hanging around his neck. Levis’ heart skipped a beat.

“Do I know you”, he meant to ask, but it came out as a statement. He could see the young man flinch while painting, his hand freezing in place. He heard the younger man curse as he quickly grabbed a torn piece of a white towel that was already covered in colorful specks of different sizes and shapes, quickly brushing over it and gritting his teeth as his mistake seemingly didn’t want leave his ‘masterpiece’. He clicked his tongue and suddenly stopped his harsh movements, deeply sighing and lowering his head in defeat.

“Oi. Answer me.”

“Huh?” he raised his head to look at Levi who didn’t seem to be eager to listen to his excuses.

“Don’t go playing deaf here, shithead. I saw you flinch. You know something, don’t you”, again, his voice was reduced to a statement rather than a question since he felt a lump in his throat that was only growing by the sheer amount of expectation that was accumulating inside him. The young man chuckled nervously.

“I flinched ‘cause I made your smile look like a mustache… could you perhaps grow a mustache so I could compare you to my picture in front of my dad so he’d see how talented I am? I mean, it’s too late to go study art, but at least I’d be able to-“

“How come you know my name?”

As the much anticipated question rang in his ears, the young adult immediately looked down as if it would make him invisible in front of the man. He couldn’t turn and run now… Or could he? Their apartment wasn’t that far away… No. Not like this. He wasn’t going to back off now. This was the sole purpose of why he was even still here, painting the man even though he had promised to be at home by eight. He had daydreamt of this moment and prayed for this moment to come day after day, but now it was there, and he was being a complete coward, his mouth opening and closing as if he had branchiae and was lying in the sand for hours, and once Levi’s soaked body came into sight, he wanted to run right into him and embrace him in the longest, most annoying hug he could muster; like only the thought of him had kept him alive, waiting.

_“Because I’ve seen you in my dreams, again and again, Captain. I remember you, every single aspect of you, every single one of your gestures and every single one of your comments, the   way you always held your cup of tea, the way you’d always complain about the slightest things because it was a ritual of yours, the way you would only tell literal shit jokes, the way you looked at me and stayed by my side even though I was full of bullshit, and the way you once completely melted down, when I had given you that box of freshly made, but terribly tasting, homemade chocolates for Valentine’s day… Sir… No, Levi! You might not remember me and think of me as completely bonkers, but I know it’s true! Levi… I… I…”_

“I have to go”, the young man quickly stated and wanted to punch his guts out at how stupid and afraid he always acted, but his heart was hammering in his chest as he wanted to spill out everything already. He shouldn’t make a scene. Maybe he’s just imagining it. Maybe he was tired. Maybe Levi didn’t remember him at all. That thought made him stop in the middle of cleaning after himself to look back at the man that still stood there as if he were frozen. When he saw Levi’s worried expression, accompanied by the way his hand twitched as if it wanted to reach out to him, his face scrunched up as he yelled, “I’m sorry!”

He hurriedly picked up his small, still open tubes of oil paint, his towels and brushes, spilling water out of a small plastic cup and putting everything into his shirt, leaving half of his equipment behind and starting away from the shocked man whose eyes were wide open, burning holes into him.

“Wait, what’s with-“

The young man quickly turned around to smile widely at the man with the familiar black undercut, the cold eyes, and at that small, soft face, “I’ll come back tomorrow, no one ever touches it!” he lied. He would be home by tomorrow, far away, and he was sure his entire family was already searching for him like mad, calling the police and asking random strangers if they had seen a short-tempered brunet with a key around his neck that carries a canvas without ever drawing anything onto it around him.

“You’ll fucking smear paint all over yourself, at least take the bag with you again”, Levi said from the distance, but the young man didn’t want to listen. He tightly closed his eyes as he started running now, ignoring the suffocating pain that was spreading from his heart towards his throat, heating his cheeks up and tearing him into half. He felt as if his soul had separated from his body in the middle of his run and felt a strong urge to turn back, just to see his face one more time, before completely ignoring what had happened for the rest of his life. He could live a normal life, with normal people that weren’t part of an organization that was killing off giant humanoid man-eating beasts once. He could live without this encounter. Honestly, he even stopped believing the encounter would ever happen. He felt a small hot droplet sliding down his cheek and he quickly clenched his teeth to prevent more of them joining that one tear that immediately made him realize what he still felt for that man. No. _No. NO._

“I at least want to see that picture I had to stand around for!” Levi suddenly yelled and the brunet stopped dead in his tracks, feeling his legs tremble. His former Captain was angry. And he would rarely be angry, only if he was in a dire situation. He didn’t see it nor hear it, but he could feel the short man creep closer. He didn’t need to see to know how the man looked like at the moment, “I could’ve been back home already, instead I’m just standing around, talking to some random ass brat that made me stand around for… nothing? Just so that I could waste my time here? Like I don’t have better shit to do. My friend’s probably puking her guts out, not only from sickness, but from worry too, since I had told her I’d come back soon. And that blonde skyscraper’s eyebrows are probably scrubbing the floor behind her. And here I am, an hour later, still on the beach, still having accomplished absolutely nothing.”

When Levi got close enough to actually hear the brunet’s silent whimpers, he stopped and just stared ahead of himself. That weeping filled with so many disconsolate emotions… he felt as if he had heard it hundreds of times and tried to make it stop hundreds of times. He hated it when people wept in front of him, whether it was for a reason or not, but that voice kept him alert, interested and, most surprisingly, attentive. The boy held his forearm over his eyes and refused to turn into his direction, and as much as Levi appreciated looking at the man’s round backside, he still wanted to see his face. He ached to see his face now, a burning sensation boiling his blood and making his heart race as if his life was in danger, tensing every single muscle of his body and slowly suffocating him.

“Please”, Levi muttered and the man in front of him removed his arm from his eyes, looking down in defeat. The man in the once completely white, and now pretty speckled and colorful, button-up shirt approached him with his sight steadily on the ground, but Levi couldn’t bring himself to look up as well. When the taller man stopped in front of him and held out the canvas for him to take, Levi made sure not to touch the young man’s paint-smeared fingers that held the canvas tightly, as if he was afraid to let go of it.

“It’s… not very good, but…”

Levi snatched the canvas away from the younger man, immediately looking down at it and widening his eyes. The scenery that was displayed on the canvas was gloomy, with the sky being colored in a grayish color that mixed with red at the top right corner and had some red lines over the grayish horizon as well, the paint there being thick and dense, going into circles that passed over the tops of the biggest part of the picture, the big dark, almost black trees with branches that were sticking out into every direction as if they were poking the sky and the sky bled. Realistically colored blood was smeared onto the dusty ground and it made Levi’s stomach turn since it looked so real. But what surprised him wasn’t the fact that the young man was drawing dark, gloomy, bloody forests while enjoying a day at the beach, with the sun slowly fading behind the big body of water and with the breeze gently caressing his cheeks, but the fact that there was a beautiful black horse in the centre of that painting, with its rider reminding him of himself, but not how he is today. Sure, the facial features were practically screaming that it’s him, everything except from the smear that was his supposed smile, but he would never in his entire life wear clothes like that… again. He would never wear a long dark green cape that displayed two heroic wings intertwined with each other, freedom and death, strength and hope, so detailed, so real, so… _gruesome_.

He saw the young man back off when he had dropped the painting, unable to hold it in his trembling hands any longer. Levi’s hands were still in the air as he slowly looked up to meet the brunet’s reddish eyes, seeing him sweetly smile down at him. And once those big pools of blue with a green explosion around their dark center collided with his eyes completely, he felt as if his heart stopped and didn’t want to start beating again, as if all the noises around them faded all of a sudden, and as if nothing else mattered any more, not even the people that were eyeing them. He could feel his facial features morph on his face, his frown deepening while his eyebrows relaxed, his eyes widening with each second that passed while looking into those eyes he somehow failed to recognize immediately.

“Eren…?” he stepped a step closer and barely managed to whisper as he saw a bitter smile creeping onto the brunet’s face, his eyes that reflected Levi’s shocked, emotional face filling up with clear, shining tears.

“Hello, Levi”, the young man silently responded, his smile growing for a while before he had to minimize it to prevent tears from streaming down his face again. He opened his mouth when he saw the older man’s scarred, dry, trembling hands reaching up to cup his face, but instead of cupping it, he grabbed Eren’s left hand and cupped it from both sides, clenching it so tightly that Eren thought it would break all of his bones, but he couldn’t care less. The man’s quivering hands made his entire arm shake as well. Levi’s gaze was directed only at his soft, unusually cold hand as he struggled to breathe before suddenly loudly whimpering and pressing his hand against his forehead, clenching his hand even harder, hoping the boy wouldn’t disappear if he’d clench too hard, but he was too afraid of letting go as well.

“Eren… Are you… real?” Levi silently asked as his voice cracked mid-sentence, slowly looking up to meet the boy’s wet eyes, feeling as if he wouldn’t take it if the person in front of him said that he wasn’t, but Eren didn’t say anything. He just smiled widely, his grin erasing any doubt in Levi, and the raven felt his lips turning upwards to form a soft smile as he looked back down at the hand he held secure in both of his, softly kissing his knuckles one by one, over and over, until he couldn’t keep it in anymore and fell to his knees, still clenching Eren’s hand, his deep frown threatening to scar his face permanently. Eren fell to his knees as well, and Levi soon felt a pair of arms shyly sneak around him, so he threw himself into Eren’s shirt, hoping all the paint on it would get traced to his face and to his hands and to his own clothes.

“Eren…” Levi’s shaky voice called him and the brunet looked down, a smile spreading on his face again as he saw Levi’s shaking hands slowly reaching up to cup his face, his cool fingertips tracing down Eren’s cheekbones.  Levi saw a tear slide down his soft cheek and wiped the tear away with his thumb, intently staring at the way his face soaked up the small particles of it because it was real beyond measures. Levi pulled him closer, his hands exploring his face and touching his cheeks, his jaw, his chin, his lips, then sliding his hands to his temples and grasping the boy’s soft locks. Eren had paint all over himself, the crimson red color he used for the blood on the dusty ground shining from all of the places Levi’s hands had touched, but it was still Eren, his Eren whom he knew a long time ago, the same Eren that made his heart flutter against his will in the most stupid ways at the worst occasions and that basically followed him around like a dog until Levi didn’t fall in front of him, utterly desperate to keep him secure for all times and trying to word the thoughts that lingered in his mind at that moment, but he couldn’t possibly say them out loud and was too afraid to show them as well, Eren that stood in front of him and stared not having a clue what to do since his Captain’s words got stuck in his mouth and decided to just hug him, hug his superior the strongest he could, letting the man enough space to resist, but Levi had melted into him and didn’t want to let go, because he knew if he would, he’d lose him. And eventually, the Captain had to let go. It was his beautiful Eren that realized why Levi started smiling and made sure to smear his cheek with grayish-blue paint to return the favor, chuckling when Levi pouted, but passed through his locks with his thin, chilling fingers, so Eren took both of the short man’s hands into his and put them behind his back so that Levi would get closer, their faces being mere inches apart, “I…”

Eren softly smiled and traced the red paint on his lips to Levi’s.

**Author's Note:**

> I may or may not have had a traumatic experience as a child in which I sat on a jellyfish.


End file.
